Pan-Africanism and the Black American

Pan-Africanism is a worldwide intellectual movement channeled towards strengthening and uplifting the feeling of oneness among everyone with an African origin. The movement spreads across, not just continental Africans, but also among Africans in the United States and the Caribbean, drawing from common event like the Atlantic slave trade.

The bedrock of this movement rests on the belief that unity is important for the progress of the social, political and economic life of the people and the movement’s aim is to encourage and unite everyone with an African origin. This ideology stresses that the people and countries of Africa have a common destiny. “A belief that African peoples, both on the continent and in the Diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny”. This is the backbone of Pan-Africanism.

Unlike people of other races living in America, many black Americans do not fully identify with their African ancestry. This disconnection is mostly due to the fact that most black Americans cannot connect to a particular country in Africa, due to the Atlantic slave trade which left no other connection between them and their African ancestry apart from skin color.

This feeling of disconnection is the main war that Pan-Africanism has come to tackle, and to do this, all people of black skin color have to unite in one spirit to uplift their African ancestry.